I love Julie Bindel. There, I've said it, I love the woman some people love to hate.

We are bonded by offensiveness. When her activities got her into rucks with strangers who knew no better she'd pass herself off as me. Out of sheer malice. Marvellous. She is an adversary to be treasured. She is necessary. She's clever and quick, which sometimes makes her rough and even wrong; and yes, sometimes rude.

Bindel is also an inventive feminist campaigner who has helped to make life better for some women living the worst lives. Everyone should be entitled to hear her thinking aloud about gender politics. And she's a scream, a low-down stand-up; and she should go on the stage. Ah, there's the thing.

It is getting as hard to catch sight of her as it is of Aretha Franklin. Bindel is, in effect, being banned. Airing the complications and troubles of transgender politics is being traduced as "transphobia". Transgender people who used to live as men and now live as women persuaded the May 2009 NUS women's conference to mandate its officers to share no platform with Julie Bindel. Proponents say they are offended by Bindel's critique – aired in the Guardian since 2004 – of "trannies"' perceived cultural conservatism and anatomical violence.

The NUS women's campaign shows no solidarity with women who are offended by the presence in their safe spaces of people who used to be men telling them which women they may listen to and who qualifies as queer. This month, her enemies mustered a picket outside Queer Question Time in a London pub. They're not censoring her, they say, you can read her, they say, just don't go to hear her. That renders her "audience" passive consumers but not engaged debaters. By the way, the blogger's sexual semantics are interesting: women should "have the balls" to stop Bindel speaking.

They're offended? So what? Offensiveness is a discourse shared by both politics and comedy. "Offendedness" is a privileged, protected category in the NUS against, specifically, rightwing extremists, racists and Julie Bindel. The women's officer Olivia Bailey insists this is "not no platform" for Bindel. "The expression of transphobic views directly discriminates" against "valued members of our campaign." It's just that, "We welcome our trans sisters" and a group of them "had been made to feel uncomfortable". Again, so what? This solidarity does not extend to women who feel unsettled by the presence of people who used to be men in women-only spaces and services.

This campaign obscures the question of power and the theory and practise of politics. Politics is the art of peaceful conflict. Index on Censorship reminds us that conflict and controversy are essential to civil society. "There is no right not to be offended," says Padraig Reidy, Index spokesperson. "To imagine that you should be protected from offense to your sensibilities is neither realistic nor desirable."

The transgender vigilantes should listen up, wise up and grow up, participate in, not proscribe, the debate they started. And their best friends in the NUS should do what best friends do: tell them to stop it, their politics stink.